The Last Dancer

by The Last Dancer (new ed) (mobi)

  "You suffered from radiation poisoning, anoxia, and heat prostration. Blood vessels in your eyes and ears had burst; you experienced vacuum bruises across much of the surface of your body."

  "How am I now?"

  "The radiation poisoning has not resulted in significant damage to tissue; the anoxia does not appear to have caused neurological damage; the heat prostration and vacuum damage were minor."

  Denice raised her voice. "Command, lights up."

  Nothing; the room was not keyed to respond to her. "'Bot, what services can I request of you?"

  "The delivery of food and drink; you can request medical services, but I will likely deny them; I have been instructed to apply skepticism to any request you make of me. That is all."

  "Can you call someone for me?"

  "No, 'Selle Daimara."

  She stood. In the darkness, her balance felt badly off. A slow, sliding step forward, and then another, hands outstretched. A wall. She followed the wall, came to a corner, followed that wall to a door. She searched for the doorpad, found none. It confirmed her suspicions; the "room" was a cell with a medbot. Follow the wall further--

  She found a toilet in the corner.

  Denice returned to her bed, removed the gown, and sat down, in lotus, in the center of the bed. If the 'bot wouldn't tell her what she needed to know, if she couldn't leave by normal means, she could still go look around.

  She slowed her breathing, slowed her heartbeat, and--

  --did nothing.

  She whispered it. "What have you done to me?"

  The medbot said, "We have healed you, 'Selle Daimara."

  The glowpaint came on abruptly, scaled up in a fraction of a second to a bright yellow glow.

  "'Bot, what time is it?"

  "Six a.m., 'Selle Daimara."

  Denice waited, restlessly, watching the door. Shortly before eight it curled aside.

  The man who stepped through was a middle-aged, fit man with rugged good looks, in civilian clothes. In the corridor outside, before the door unrolled shut, she caught sight of a man and woman in paramilitary fatigues, carrying laser rifles.

  The man did not seem to notice her nudity. He seated himself in the memory-plastic chair that extruded itself from the floor, said, "Good morning, Denice."

  "Who are you?"

  "My name doesn't matter, I think. I'm your doctor."

  Denice nodded. She'd stayed nude intentionally; it didn't bother her, and she had hoped it might distract whoever came to get her. Not this one, not if he was really a doctor. "I have to call you something."

  "Hmm. Doctor Derek."

  "Uh--"

  "Yes?"

  "Isn't he a character on one of the soaps?"

  Doctor Derek blushed. "Yes."

  "Okay," said Denice slowly. "Things keep getting stranger and stranger every time I turn around. I suppose a doctor from a soap Board isn't too bad. I mean--"

  "Yes?"

  "All considered," Denice finished.

  Doctor Derek smiled at her. "That's the spirit."

  "So. What have you done to me, Doctor Derek?"

  He did not misunderstand her. "When we interrogated you, you told us that when you were drunk, the Castanaveras Gift shut itself down. We tried several different painkillers, until we found one that would both work and not enrage your nanovirus vaccine."

  "That simple."

  Doctor Derek shrugged. "Mister Obodi's suggestion. Quite a brilliant man, actually."

  "It's not permanent? The 'bot said I'd been 'healed'--"

  He shook his head gently. "No, I think you misunderstood the 'bot. We haven't permanently altered any aspect of your physiology or metabolism. When we cease administering the drug, you should regain the Gift."

  Until that moment, as the relief washed through her, Denice had not realized how frightened she was. She had to pause a moment before continuing. "Who else knows about me?"

  He frowned. "Your presence? Lord, dozens--"

  "Who knows who I am?"

  "Oh." He studied her silently for a moment. "Myself and Obodi, to my knowledge. We were the only ones present when you were interrogated. But he might have told others. I really wouldn't know."

  She took a deep breath. "Okay. Where am I?"

  "I see no harm in telling you that. You're in San Diego. This cell is in the basement of the Latham Building."

  "What's going on in the world outside?"

  Doctor Derek paused, thinking back. "Hmm. You've been out of it since--let's see. Okay. Japan declared independence, you'd know that. We--the Rebs, I mean, you're in Reb hands obviously--we moved on the Fourth. I'm told things are going well, but honestly I wouldn't know; I'm just a doctor, and most of the war news is need-to-know. We've taken most of the West Coast; the PKF has recovered a big chunk of Los Angeles, though. Commissioner Vance dropped eleven hundred-odd SB's onto Santa Monica late on the Fourth; took us pretty badly by surprise. Our intelligence had said they planned to roll down on us from the north, and we weren't prepared to fight to keep L.A. the very day we took it. We've actually had to evacuate operations in L.A. I'm told we still hold the city--downtown, mostly because the Claw is making a stand there at the downtown Temples--but that won't last much longer."

  "Casualties?"

  He hesitated. "I don't know. Bad, on both sides. Maybe fifty thousand dead PKF, I've heard, but that's a guess. Could be twice that. It's not much less. Apparently we've killed a couple of dozen Elite as well."

  "On our side?"

  He shook his head. "Bad. Civilian deaths included, just in L.A. we lost maybe half a million, maybe a million--" He shook his head again, wearily. "Bad. They used tacnukes a couple of times. I don't have any numbers. We laid X-laser down all over Paris after they used the tacs; they haven't done it again. Thirty or forty thousand dead in Paris."

  "You're being very blunt, Doctor."

  "I haven't been told not to be."

  "Where are my companions?"

  Doctor Derek shook his head. "I don't know who you mean."

  "Robert Yo, he's American, Japanese descent. Short, fiftyish--"

  The doctor was nodding. "I've seen him. He was suffering from radiation poisoning when they brought him in; almost as bad as you, they pulled him in only an hour before they found you. I haven't seen him in several days; apparently he's being confined. I believe he's healthy."

  "William Devane, he's a newsdancer. Big guy, black hair, black eyes."

  "He's with you?"

  "Yes."

  The doctor looked briefly disturbed. "Sorry. I didn't know that."

  "What's wrong?"

  "Apparently," said Doctor Derek carefully, "Mister Obodi doesn't care for him."

  "Is he dead?"

  Doctor Derek hesitated, looked straight at her. "Close enough for government work."

  Denice ordered her thoughts. It got easier as they went on; the Gift was gone, but otherwise she seemed to be in command of herself. The painkiller, whatever it was, did not seem to have reduced her sensitivity to sensation; and as for pain, she didn't hurt, so either she was unharmed or it was the painkiller. "Okay. How about my brother?"

  Denice saw she had surprised the man. "Ah--" He shook his head. "I don't know. I didn't know your brother was here."

  "I don't know he is, just that he's with Sedon."

  "Who?"

  "Gi'Suei'Obodi'Sedon. Mister Obodi. He has my brother."

  Doctor Derek shook his head. "I have not seen him."

  "Okay. What happens to me?"

  "You eat breakfast," he said promptly. "We'll bring you any clothing you request, within reason; and then we're going to take you up to the fourth floor. There's a health club up there."

  "A what?"

  He seemed slightly apologetic. "A health club. Sports Connection, I believe. Swimming pool, track, free weights, muscle stims, I don't know what else; until we took the building over the club was open to the public. Since then I don't think it's been used."

  Denice said clearly, "I
'm supposed to work out?"

  "Yes. Loosen up, stretch, get your muscles back in tone. Not that you're not in fairly remarkable shape right now, but both Mister Obodi and your gene map suggest you're capable of better. You work out today, tomorrow, and Thursday. Thursday night," the doctor said, "you'll be taken to Mister Obodi." He was embarrassed now. "He wants you to dance for him."

  Denice was the only one who used the health club. Four male guards armed with needlers, and a hunting waldo, followed her everywhere she went, even the showers. The hunting waldo in particular was never more than a few meters away from her. She knew that she could, given a few seconds to work, kill the four guards; but the waldo was another matter. If any of the guards had been carrying lasers, she might have gambled on taking out the guards, and then turning the laser on the waldo.

  But not bare-handed.

  She spent Tuesday swimming.

  Nine lanes across, an Olympic-size pool. She took the center lane and started doing laps. One hundred laps, one fifty, two hundred; at the end of two hundred she turned on her back, exhausted, and floated while looking up at the health club's high blue ceiling. The water was heated just warm enough that after a bit Denice ceased noticing the temperature or the wetness; she floated in nothing, staring up at the sky blue ceiling.

  It was very pleasant, floating there. She had spent much of the summer of '72 this way, swimming in the Pacific Ocean; floating in the gentle waves, gazing up into the infinite blue sky.

  Her thoughts wandered aimlessly. Douglass and Trent and Robert and her brother David. Jimmy Ramirez and Sedon and William Devane who was Dvan of the Gi'Tbad. All of it floated with her, detached and meaningless.

  Toward noon she got out of the pool and into the sauna. Denice lay down on the lowest level of wooden slats, and let the dry heat work its way into her muscles. Within instants sweat crawled down her skin, made damp spots on the wooden slats. She gentled her breathing and relaxed into it, felt the tension creep ever so slowly from her joints and muscles.

  She thought she slept for a while, with the guards standing in a semi-circle around the glassite-doored entrance to the sauna.

  When she awoke she didn't feel like moving, but did anyway. Up and out of the sauna, past the guards and the waldo, into the showers. She stood under lukewarm water, and then cold water until she was completely awake.

  She found a stretch of empty mat in the track room, in the center of the track. The layout was vaguely familiar to her, and then she placed it; it was, down to the placement of the mirrors on the walls, the twin of the workout room at Goddess Home.

  For the first time in over a year, she thought of Goddess Home without homesickness. It was like remembering the Chandler Complex of her childhood, something from another life. She had been, she thought, three people: the child before the Troubles; the girl afterward, who had lost everything of her childhood in nuclear flame; and now herself, the woman who had survived a jump from a tall black building in Los Angeles. In some ways it seemed to Denice that it did not much matter that her body had survived that jump; the person she had been had died that day.

  "The body," she could hear Robert saying, "is the temple of the soul, the mirror of your spirit. You have heard it said that God gives you the face you are born with, and that you earn the face you die with; it is more true of your body. If your body is unhealthy, your spirit is unhealthy."

  "Then if the body is healthy," the fifteen-year-old Denice Castanaveras had said, "the spirit is healthy?"

  "Don't be silly," Robert Dazai Yo had said, unamused. "You know better."

  Hatha Yoga is the yoga of the body. It is the best and healthiest of all stretching exercises. Denice went through the list of asanas in her mind, envisioning them before beginning: chest expansion, dancer's posture, abdominal lifts, scalp, lion, neck roll, posture clasp, knee and thigh clasp, shoulder stand, plough, back pushup, slow motion firming, candle concentration--she lacked the candle for the last exercise, but she would make do.

  The black despair she had awakened to touched her again. Isn't there anything more useful I can be doing?

  But she knew there was not. She pushed through the depression and went to work.

  She ate with a great appetite that evening.

  That night she slept without dreams.

  Wednesday morning Denice stretched for an hour, and then ran, as fast she could, for an equal time. When her breathing grew raspy in her lungs and spots danced in front of her eyes she stopped, stood with her hands on her knees until her breath came back to her. Afterward she went back to the pool, and swam a hundred laps, rested, swam another hundred, rested, and then a final hundred.

  She floated on her back, looking up at the blue expanse of ceiling.

  She wished she had thought to ask Doctor Derek how the painkiller was being delivered to her; he might have been foolish enough to answer. A timed capsule, somewhere in her body? Her food, or her water? Injection, while she slept?

  In the shower afterward she looked for needle marks, or the scaly skin symptomatic of a hypospray, but found nothing.

  They took her back to her cell.

  Denice awoke to darkness.

  She sat up in bed, slowly. Cold crept in around her; she pulled her covers more closely about her, but it did not help. She glanced to her left, reflexively; the 'bot's monitor lights were the only source of light during the long nights.

  Nothing. The 'bot was not there.

  The voice said silently, Denice.

  Denice snapped around to look at the man standing at the foot of her bed. Despite the lack of light she saw him with unreal clarity; a man of average height, only a bit taller than herself, dressed all in black, to the hood that hung forward and covered his features. She tried to answer him in kind, her thoughts to his, and could not. She licked her lips and said, "How did you get in here?"

  I didn't. I took you out. A grim chuckle. I doubt I could enter the room you're being held in if your life and mine depended on it. My Enemy has been thorough, and tricky. He had an avatar in place, and spoke to Trent despite me.

  Denice looked around. She knew this place--the empty crystal plane, with the wavering lights at the far horizon, and her hospital bed perched in the center of all the vastness. "Who are you?"

  I am the Nameless One. The God of Players.

  "Really."

  Yes.

  "Isn't that a little arrogant?"

  The figure stood motionless for a long moment. Perhaps. Denice Castanaveras, I am--

  The scream of his rage and pain filled her ears. There was a word buried deep in the scream, or a Name, an incomprehensibility so huge that the suggestion of it overwhelmed Denice, filled her with terror and then broke her, and she found herself screaming against the great roaring sound, "Stop it! Stop it!"

  It ceased abruptly.

  Denice stared at the figure, panting, aware of the flicker of terror dancing around the edges of her thoughts, as frightened as she had ever been, as though she had encountered some great threat to her life. "What--oh, Jesus and Harry, what was that?"

  My Name. He added, apologetically, You asked, and I thought you might understand. Forgive me.

  Denice looked down, fighting to catch her breath, and then looked back up at him again. "What do you want?"

  That was my question for you. You have very little time left to decide, if you wish to live. Perhaps you will choose the Dance. Perhaps you will choose nightways. As a Dancer you might survive; as a night face you might. Undecided you will die. There is a third path, though I doubt you will choose to follow it; it is a very hard path. My path. Sedon nearly chose that way; but fear took him, and he failed.

  "Sir," said Denice Castanaveras very slowly, "I don't understand."

  I know, said the silent, compassionate voice. But it is so simple: who do you want to be?

  Thursday she meditated most of the day. Toward afternoon she went swimming again, and then let them take her back to her cell.

  Late in the evening the
y came and brought her the gi she had requested. She changed into it, tied the belt and put on the sandals.

  Six guards and a pair of waldoes took her up to see Sedon.

  * * *

  66.

  He knelt alone, in near darkness.

  Denice took off her sandals upon entering; it seemed the correct thing to do. She moved forward slowly. Cold polished wood against her bare feet. A single window, set in the far wall to her right, gave a distant view of the beach, perhaps a klick off, thirty-five stories beneath them. Floodlamps lit the beach, and the foam of the waves crashing into the beach glowed brilliantly white.

  Tanks liberated from the PKF armories, with the American flag hastily painted over the PKF and Unification insignias, sat at the edge of the beach.

  Sedon's features hung half in light, half in darkness. To Denice's genie eyes the right side of his face glowed white from the floodlamps on the beach; the left side, faintly infrared with the warmth of Sedon's skin.

  His voice was soft and gentle. "Seat yourself, Denice Castanaveras."

  She did, sinking into a comfortable half lotus in front of him.

  They stayed so, she sitting, Sedon kneeling, while Denice's eyes adjusted more fully to the darkness. His breathing was very slow and very deep, his clothing some flowing garment of bright red, more like a loose gi than a robe. He watched her, nearly unblinking, while her breathing gentled and slowed to match his own.

  Time passed. Perhaps an hour, perhaps two. Her sense of time fled while she sat there, staring into his eyes.

  Finally he spoke. "Movement is life. All life arises from movement; the movement of atoms and molecules and cells; when movement stops, life stops.

  "Dance is movement; movement is life; dance is life.

  "As all living things breathe, all living things dance. Dance is the harmonious expression of life. It is energy expended; it is the first source of harmony in the world.

  "The proper expression of life consists of moving in harmony with the world. To move in harmony with the world, with other people, with the things of the world, with ourselves; this is ultimate expression of dance. All living things wish to move well; it is built into them to wish it, for living things that move well are better fit to survive than those which do not."